Before I get started here, I should say that I grew up in a foreign country and have missed out on a lot of popular culture in the US. Imagine my surprise then to discover that Beaver Cleaver was a child actor in a late 1950s comedy show and not a porn star!
Who could have guessed?
Anyway, according to the Center for Disease Control, 35.7% of Americans are obese. The news media is awash in articles and reports about how serious a health problem this presents to us as a nation and wrings its hands over what steps we can take to solve it.
It's easy to get sucked into this debate about health concerns, while ignoring the fact that there may be pluses to the growing waistlines of the American population. In an article last year, I promoted green energy through the mining of America's rich, untapped fuel-resource, fat.
There is no question that with rising gasoline prices and increasing dependence for oil on an unstable region of the world, this sort of forward-thinking is necessary to our future security and progress as a nation.
But that is not enough.
Scientists at Stanford University have developed a technique for turning fat into stem cells. Working with donated fat ("an abundant natural resource and a renewable one," according to surgeon Michael Longaker) scientists have used cutting-edge medical techniques to transform fat cells into stem cells. Stem cells are primitive cells which can be triggered to develop into any type of cell in the body. If your heart is failing, for example, in theory a stem-cell could be prodded into providing new heart muscle tissue which could be used to replace damaged parts of your heart, giving you a new lease on life. This means that the so-called moral issues of using embryonic stem cells from unused human embryos can be dodged. Moreover anyone can provide the "resources" for one's own stem-cell therapy, thereby avoiding tissue rejection problems.
Do you realize what this means?
As I explained in another article, the United States is collectively carrying around the total body weight of two Swedens in extra fat. While 5.28 billion pounds or 2.4 billion kilograms overweight may seem like a lot, in terms of total consumption, it doesn't go very far. The US daily consumption of oil is 18,690,000 barrels per day. Each barrel weighs in at 305 lbs (138.8 kg), so the total weight of oil consumed each day is around 5.7 billion lbs or 2.6 billion kilograms. Though I am not good at math, even I can tell that if we pumped all the fat that America has to spare, we would not have enough to cover even one day of our total oil consumption. People would be thinner, but houses would be cold; cars would run out of gas on the roads.
Clearly, simple extraction will not solve our fuel crisis or bring us closer to energy independence. If these fat-derived stem cells can be turned into any kind of human cell, it means that they can also be turned into more fat cells! Using this new breakthrough technology developed at Stanford University, we can use fat cells to grow more fat cells! According to the National Institutes of Health, one stem cell can be grown into millions – yes millions – of other cells which are themselves self-proliferating. If our total fat resources today can almost provide one day of oil consumption, having the ability to increase this amount by – say – even a thousand fold will insure that America can limit its reliance on fossil fuels, thereby reducing its carbon footprint with green energy, and finally achieving energy independence for a better tomorrow.
Very Creative Thinking.
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